Events+Lectures

Hymns & Qualms

A reading by poet and translator Peter Cole (Yale University)

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

MacArthur winner Peter Cole reads from his new book, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (American Poets), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work. His poetry, writes Ben Lerner, “is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless.”

“Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.”—Harold Bloom